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Italian police officers investigated for beatings and torture of suspects

Five police officers in northern Italy have been placed under house arrest pending an inquiry into allegations they beat and tortured detainees, most of them foreign nationals, newspapers reported on Wednesday.

Published: 7 June 2023 17:26 CEST
AFP file photo of an Italian police car.
AFP file photo of an Italian police car. Photo: Andreas SOLARO / AFP

An inspector and four officers in Verona, northeast Italy, are accused of beating and insulting people held in custody, La Stampa daily reported.

A dozen of their colleagues are also under investigation for having allegedly done nothing to stop the abuse, the report added.

La Stampa cited a former prisoner, a Romanian, who said officers had forced him to urinate in a corner of his cell at a police station in Verona, having refused to let him use the toilet.

Afterwards, they beat him up and dragged him over the floor where he had had to urinate, to punish him.

“If these facts are confirmed, it would be enormously serious,” Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said Wednesday.

READ ALSO: ‘Treated like a dog’: Transgender woman sues over Italian police brutality

Such conduct damaged “not just the dignity of the victims but also the honour and the reputation” of thousands of honest police officers, he added.

Late last month, a Brazilian transgender woman sued police officers in Milan for alleged brutality, after they beat her in an incident recorded in a video that went viral online.

It showed three officers using their batons to strike the 41-year-old on the head and in the ribs while spraying her with tear gas as she sat in the street, her hands raised.

Prosecutors have opened an investigation into the incident.

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CRIME

Italy has most recovery fund fraud cases in EU, report finds

Italy is conducting more investigations into alleged fraud of funds from the EU post-Covid fund and has higher estimated losses than any other country, the European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO) said.

Published: 8 April 2024 17:05 CEST
Italy has most recovery fund fraud cases in EU, report finds

The EPPO reportedly placed Italy under special surveillance measures following findings that 179 out of a total of 206 investigations into alleged fraud of funds through the NextGenerationEU programme were in Italy, news agency Ansa reported.

Overall, Italy also had the highest amount of estimated damage to the EU budget related to active investigations into alleged fraud and financial wrongdoing of all types, the EPPO said in its annual report published on Friday.

The findings were published after a major international police investigation into fraud of EU recovery funds on Thursday, in which police seized 600 million euros’ worth of assets, including luxury villas and supercars, in northern Italy.

The European Union’s Recovery and Resilience Facility, established to help countries bounce back from the economic blow dealt by the Covid pandemic, is worth more than 800 billion euros, financed in large part through common EU borrowing.

READ ALSO: ‘It would be a disaster’: Is Italy at risk of losing EU recovery funds?

Italy has been the largest beneficiary, awarded 194.4 billion euros through a combination of grants and loans – but there have long been warnings from law enforcement that Covid recovery funding would be targeted by organised crime groups.

2023 was reportedly the first year in which EU financial bodies had conducted audits into the use of funds under the NextGenerationEU program, of which the Recovery Fund is part.

The EPPO said that there were a total of 618 active investigations into alleged fraud cases in Italy at the end of 2023, worth 7.38 billion euros, including 5.22 billion euros from VAT fraud alone.

At the end of 2023, the EPPO had a total of 1,927 investigations open, with an overall estimated damage to the EU budget of 19.2 billion euros.

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